Image-To-Image Translation With Conditional Adversarial Networks

Phillip Isola, Jun-Yan Zhu, Tinghui Zhou, Alexei A. Efros; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 1125-1134

We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. Moreover, since the release of the pix2pix software associated with this paper, hundreds of twitter users have posted their own artistic experiments using our system. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without handengineering our loss functions either.